BlueBeam - A Cad Focused PDF Editor - Ends Perpetual Licences.

goodtofufriday · February 20

Summary

BlueBeam is a industry focused PDF viewer that many who deal with cad or archictectual design utilize as it allows for a lot of work to be done with existing PDF drawings. Previosuly BlueBeam had a perpetual license once purchased. Yet they were not as forver as implied.

These were set to expire 9/29/2023. Those who used to only pay a Maintence Fee (Active support) are now finding that they are being forced to upgrade to the latest version of bluebeam, which is now an annual subscription, in order to continue recieving support.

The Current update is that as of now you can no longer be activate existing licenses on new machines, even if your old machine died.

Quotes

Quote

"As you may already know, the renewal and purchase of new Bluebeam perpetual licenses has ended on 9/29. As such, the only option provided by Bluebeam going forward is to renew your licenses as Bluebeam version 21 subscription licenses."

Before

Now

My thoughts

This affects my company directly. At this point only two of the services we utilize as business critical do not have a subscription model, and only one of those two would be unable to remove that ability from us, though they could deny us future updates. The world is continuously getting greedier, and thus more expensive.

Sources

Me: business email from bluebeam concerning required renewal.
https://support.bluebeam.com/articles/revu-20-below-licensing-faq/

wanderingfool2 · February 20

5 minutes ago, goodtofufriday said:

This affects my company directly. At this point only two of the services we utilize as business critical do not have a subscription model, and only one of those two would be unable to remove that ability from us, though they could deny us future updates. The world is continuously getting greedier, and thus more expensive.

I'd say a whole "it depends".

I do think that a lot of software is grossly overpriced in terms of subscriptions, and I do agree a lot of it seems about greed...but I do think a subscription model can be reasonable if it's priced correctly. Development of new versions does cost money, and sometimes the barrier to entry for companies is just too large to attempt using a new technology/software in their business when it's a perpetual license (and the maintaining of the software).

With that said, a lot of places bundle too many services together making it so that you overpay for something that you underutilize.

goodtofufriday · February 20

53 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

I'd say a whole "it depends".

I do think that a lot of software is grossly overpriced in terms of subscriptions, and I do agree a lot of it seems about greed...but I do think a subscription model can be reasonable if it's priced correctly. Development of new versions does cost money, and sometimes the barrier to entry for companies is just too large to attempt using a new technology/software in their business when it's a perpetual license (and the maintaining of the software).

With that said, a lot of places bundle too many services together making it so that you overpay for something that you underutilize.

For these guys you have to pay for their highest teir subscription model in order to have the same feature set as before.

Kisai · February 21

7 hours ago, goodtofufriday said:

My thoughts

This affects my company directly. At this point only two of the services we utilize as business critical do not have a subscription model, and only one of those two would be unable to remove that ability from us, though they could deny us future updates. The world is continuously getting greedier, and thus more expensive.

Sources

Me: business email from bluebeam concerning required renewal.
https://support.bluebeam.com/articles/revu-20-below-licensing-faq/

The engineering company I was doing work for during covid used this product and they largely pushed everyone but the engineers to use the free PDF Xchange. (Basically anyone who was using the adobe reader, but not editing things.)

The thing that annoys me about proprietary PDF products, is that they extremely mislead the reason for any kind of update. Bluebeams selling point is the collab server product. Hence you're paying for access to this server... and everyone decided to put this crap in the cloud in 2019.